ART BORN IN THE FULLNESS OF AGE

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THOUGH NOTHING IF NOT SPECIFIC, ''old-age art'' as a name lacks glamour. It makes us think of elderly persons pecking in dudgeon at a pre-electric typewriter, turning away in despair from an unfinished canvas or giving up on a commissioned concerto because they cannot think how to get beyond the opening tutti. That name is just too gloomy. ''How about coming round for some old-age art?'' is not an invitation by which courtship can be advanced.

''Old-age art'' is a name coined in 1972 by Kenneth Clark - art historian, museum director and author and narrator of the television series called ''Civilization'' -in a lecture called ''The Artist Grows Old.'' It refers to work done in old age in a distinctive, innovatory and often problematic style by creative people in all the arts, from Aeschylus in the ''Oresteia'' in 458 B.C. to this year's music by Elliott Carter and this year's paintings by Willem de Kooning and Francis Bacon. Late work, in that sense, has a specifically late style, easier to recognize than to define, but in any case unmistakable.

''Old-age art'' includes some of the greatest of human achievements. It would be a waste of life not to know the late work of Titian and Rembrandt, the last plays of Shakespeare, the late quartets of Beethoven, Giuseppe Verdi's ''Falstaff'' and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo's ceiling in the Bishop's Palace in Wurzburg, West Germany. The same could be said of the late paintings of J. M. W. Turner and Georges Braque, the late pastels of Edgar Degas, the last plays of Henrik Ibsen, ''The Ambassadors'' by Henry James, ''Metamorphosen'' by Richard Strauss, the last poems of William Butler Yeats and the last films of Akira Kurosawa and Luis Bunuel.

Old-age art has not come to an end, either. As the critic Andrew Porter said not long ago, ''There is no bad music by Elliott Carter,'' and although Mr. Carter will be 80 next year, his every new work is coveted worldwide.

The English novelist Anthony Powell is 81, and after he completed the 12 volumes of his ''Dance to the Music of Time'' in 1975 he could have put his feet up on the sofa. But he didn't, and his last novel, ''The Fisher King'' (1986), has one of the most beautiful concluding paragraphs in the long history of the English novel.

Willem de Kooning is 83, but his most recent paintings break new ground in a lean, serpentine idiom. Louise Bourgeois is 75, but her every new sculpture is full of what Kenneth Clark in another context called ''marvelous and embarrassing psychological insights.'' Merce Cunningham is ''old,'' as dancers go, but what he is doing with his company is as innovative as ever.

Nothing in the current season of promenade concerts in the Royal Albert Hall in London is likely to be fresher or more surprising than the ''Roaratorio'' that Mr. Cunningham and his longtime colleague John Cage contributed last year to the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. His most recent work, ''Carousal,'' has just been premiered at Jacob's Pillow in Massachusetts. Cunningham's is an art of risk, an art of discovery and an art of self-scrutiny. It is, in fact, a long-running and ruminative autobiography that has to be seen, not read.

If work of this kind has a special fascination for us, it is not simply because, in Kenneth Clark's words, ''old, even very old, artists have added something of immense value to the sum of human experience.'' It is because the late work of major creative artists has so often been unprecedented, problematic, ''difficult'' and above all fearless. There is no greater compliment than the one paid to Ibsen by James Joyce when he was only 18 and had just read Ibsen's last play, ''When We Dead Awaken.'' The nine words in question are, ''Ibsen's genius as an artist faces all, shirks nothing.''

To ''face all and shirk nothing'' is a posture that we recognize in Bunuel's movie ''Tristana,'' in Samuel Beckett's monodrama ''Not I'' and in the strange conflations - half-drifted sand, half-human body - that Francis Bacon lately set down on canvas. It is not a posture that comes easily. Ibsen groaned aloud toward the end of his life. ''If only my powers last!'' he said. ''But they must! They must!'' As for Caspar David Friedrich, most visionary of German romantic painters, he said in the 1830's that he would hole up inside himself, leaving it to time to show what would come of his imaginings - ''a brilliant butterfly, or a maggot.''

We have only to read Shakespeare's last plays - ''Pericles,'' for one, and ''The Winter's Tale,'' for another - to realize that what Kenneth Clark called ''the fierce new world of the aged imagination'' can be a place of terror and confusion, in which fancies unavowable in earlier years take over and run wild. Disease, senility, hatred, violence, twisted sexuality and the foulest possible invective abound. It has nothing to do with the ''old age, serene and bright and lovely as a Lapland night'' that we read about in William Wordsworth's ''To a Young Lady.'' There is nothing pretty or soothing about the ''Night Fantasies'' that are the subject of a recent piece for piano by Elliott Carter. But if we look and listen in the right way, late art of every kind offers us what Clark called ''a glimpse of some irrational and absolute truth that could be revealed only by a great artist in his old age.''

There are, of course, no absolute rules in art. Brahms did not by any means peter out at the end of his life, but there is nothing fierce or confusing about the two clarinet sonatas that he wrote for his favorite executant, Richard Muhlfeld. A delicious, inimitable ambling motion is their prime characteristic. Richard Strauss in youth was a master of tumult and boisterous exaggeration, but in ''Metamorphosen,'' an elegy for the destruction of Europe that he wrote in 1945 for 23 solo strings, all that was laid aside. It is the prerogative of the great artist to take leave of life in his own way.

In relation to late works of art, every generation defines itself. In doing so, it reveals insights, predispositions and blind spots unknown to its predecessors. We cannot imagine today what possessed the burghers of Amsterdam to turn down that most arresting of late Rembrandts, ''Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis,'' and refuse to pay for it. We laugh to read how people could not read the late paintings of Turner and dismissed them as daubs without meaning. Within our own lifetimes, the late works of Igor Stravinsky were thought of as willful, spindly and contrived. As for late Picasso, it was dismissed as senility made visible.

It is a discovery of our own day that there is such a thing as the deliberately terrible late style. In painting, Francis Picabia, Giorgio de Chirico and for a moment or two Rene Magritte flouted every canon of ''good taste'' in order to tread new, strange and quite possibly dangerous ground. In late Picabia, in particular, the source of much in more recent painting can be found. Historians used to believe that everything important in the arts came in through the front door, but with Picabia the new art climbed in through a forbidden entrance at the back. Once there, it stayed, carousing.

We have also discovered that late style is not the prerogative of painter, sculptor, poet and composer. Performer and director have also their late styles. What is Peter Brook's 'Mahabharata'' - due in October as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival, if not a prime example of late style? Those who remember the sovereign concision with which Brook directed Jean-Paul Sartre's ''No Exit'' in London just after World War II will know exactly how far he has traveled to make this nine-hour epic drama on a subject drawn from Indian mythology.

There is a late style in performance, too. When Feodor Chaliapin was in his 60's, he gave song recitals that in conventional terms were completely crazy. No one knew what he was going to do. He announced the songs by number from a fat program book. There was no attempt at ''authentic'' style in Schubert or Schumann. He broke every imaginable rule. People laughed when he began. But in no time at all they were hushed, subjugative, captive, and by the time he was through with Schubert's ''Doppelganger'' or Schumann's ''Die Beiden Grenadiere'' there was a degree of awed attention that this listener has rarely heard since. That, too, was late style, and one that faced all, and shirked nothing.

We experience late style whenever Rudolf Serkin or Vladimir Horowitz plays the piano, and we shall experience it this coming season when Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau makes a long-delayed return to Carnegie Hall. When John Gielgud and the late Ralph Richardson were here a few years ago, playing Harold Pinter's ''No Man's Land,'' we had it in spades, as we shall doubtless have it when Colleen Dewhurst and Jason Robards play in Eugene O'Neill's ''Long Day's Journey Into Night'' as part of Martin E. Segal's New York International Festival of the Arts next summer. And there are dance companies that perpetuate a late style that, but for them, would have vanished from the earth.

It could, by the way, be argued that late style does not necessarily have anything to do with the calendar. There are people who live to a great age and never develop a late style. A case in point is that of Georgia O'Keeffe, who lived to be 98 and is having a lifetime's retrospective at the National Gallery in Washington this coming season. There are also people, perhaps best not named here, who go soft after a brilliant beginning and don't begin to qualify.

And there is a third kind of artist -the ones who develop in such a dense, consistent and powerfully motivated way that they develop a late style in their early 50's. Frank Stella's forthcoming retrospective, opening Oct. 12 at the Museum of Modern Art, is likely to be an example of this. But perhaps this relates to what we know already - that everyone living has an age that is quite independent of the one given in their passport.

Altogether, the late style in the arts is a phenomenon of capital importance. If it can teach us to develop a late style in life, it will have rendered us an incomparable service. To anyone who wishes to study this problem in depth, in one place and in a limited period of time, I recommend the festival called ''End Games: A Celebration of Late Work'' that is scheduled for April and May 1988 in London. Fired by a conversation between Nicholas Snowman, the lately appointed general director (arts) at the South Bank Center, and Peter Hall, the retiring director of the National Theater, it will have a range, an imaginative power and a feeling for quality that are quite exceptional. It also will make constructive use of the resources of the South Bank of the Thames - in all three concert halls, three theaters, a repertory movie theater and a major exhibition building - in ways that might well be taken note of at Lincoln Center.

At the National Theater, where the production of Aeschylus's ''Oresteia'' in Tony Harrison's translation was hugely praised, Peter Hall plans to produce three late plays by Shakespeare - ''Pericles,'' ''Cymbeline'' and ''The Winter's Tale,'' in the little Cottesloe auditorium, thereby securing from the start the confidential, valedictory quality that is thought to have characterized the original productions in Blackfriars. In the National Film Theater, there will be late movies by Chaplin, Bergman, Hitchcock, Bunuel and others. Outside the Hayward Gallery, there will be late bronzes by Henry Moore. Plans have also been mooted for ballets based on Picasso's late etchings.

As Nicholas Snowman was for a long time Pierre Boulez's prized lieutenant at the Pompidou Center in Paris, it is natural that his hand should be conspicuous in the concert program. Such was the response of London's orchestras to the overall idea of ''End Games'' that the visitor will be able to hear late works by Monteverdi, Schutz, Bach, Mozart, Bruckner, Debussy, Faure, Mahler, Charles Ives, Stravinsky, Webern, Shostakovitch and Michael Tippett.

For the first time, that is to say, the ambitious but often rather cheerless and incoherent series of buildings on the South Bank will be what it ought to be - a dictionary of the arts, in all their diversity, with a sharp focus that will leave the visitor enriched and exalted. And what better theme than ''old-age art,'' with which younger art so often has trouble competing?

A version of this article appears in print on , Section 2, Page 1 of the National edition with the headline: ART BORN IN THE FULLNESS OF AGE. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe